On the Road with Kem

Life changes quickly in a developing country and I have been called elsewhere. As I reflect on my time in Phnom Penh, the one constant aside from my volunteer work with Daughters NGO was my tuk-tuk driver Kem. He collected me daily from work in the slums near Wat Steung Mean Chey, rain or shine--mostly rain though, among the dark late afternoon clouds.


On my last day in town, Kem drove me to the airport. Before he dropped me off, we stopped briefly, so I could interview him about the tuk-tuk, which was a source of fascination during my stay. Tuk-tuks are the major mode of tourist transport in Phnom Penh. In this hectic, lawless town, a trustworthy, savvy tuk-tuk driver is an asset. Kem was always there for me, only a text message away. He was a safe, dependable driver and a good friend. I will miss him and our daily drives.


Talking in a Tuk-tuk

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HwuYZMfmXlI

This short video, only five minutes of the fifteen we talked, is breathtakingly amateurish: The sound is poor, due to passing moto traffic; I'm sweating bullets like a rookie thanks to the heat; and at one point, there is the disconcerting sound of someone sharpening a knife. But more important than the video quality, or lack thereof, is the interviewee: The kind, hard-working man who made a challenging experience manageable for me, by ensuring I arrived, whenever, wherever, safe and sound.

Tuol Sleng

I arrived to Phnom Penh exactly three months ago by bus from Siem Reap. It is a five hour bus ride and they show movies along the way. I usually enjoy films but on this particular bus ride, they showed Zombie movies, a Khmer favourite. I had never seen a zombie movie before, did not in fact know it was a distinct genre, and I am now quite certain I never want to see another. Only marginally better were the karaoke videos played during intermission, at full volume.

When I got to town, I caught a tuk-tuk to the Boddhi Tree Hotel Umma. It is a lovely hotel, with a spacious garden restaurant and large airy rooms. But it is best known for its location. It sits directly across the street from S-21, the former Khmer Rouge prison known now as Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, where thousands of Cambodians were detained and tortured in the mid to late seventies.

The site is a former high school, comprised of four three-story buildings and a large central courtyard. Today, visitors can walk through the buildings and see the small cells where people lived for months at a time. The fourth building, Building D, is filled with graphic photos of the dead. It is not for the faint of heart.

It took me three months to find the courage to visit this place, as I had heard stories about how awful and disturbing it was. But what struck me most about Tuol Sleng was not the barbed wire, the cage-like rooms, or the photos. It was the silence: It is the most peaceful place in town.

And now for something completely different...

I was told I was going to experience beggar fatigue out here. There are beggars everywhere, young, old, limbs, no limbs, every shape, colour, and size. They are the backdrop to decades of poverty and conflict. But no, in fact I don't have beggar fatigue at all. Granted, I don't give them money when they ask, since warlord gangsters control the beggars and collect their proceeds at the end of the day. But I don't avoid them either. The beggars are simply doing their job, like the rest of us.

However, I do have a fatigue of sorts. I have "Old Western man with young Asian girl" fatigue. Every restaurant, every cafe, every street corner here, there is a Western Grandpa getting it on with a Cambodian girl forty or fifty years his junior. I said I would not judge, but I take it back. I judge now. Oh, I can talk about flip-flops and rain storms until the emaciated cows come home to the rice paddy, but the most pervasive image here is the sex tourists. It gets a little draining and after a while, you just don't want to see it anymore. If I am being ageist, by not complaining about the entire age spectrum of people exploiting the women here, well then tough, get over it. Somehow, the cute 23-year old on his gap year trip having a little romp doesn’t seem half as bad as the 70-year old man who should have gotten it out of his system long ago. So in the spirit of Juvenal and Jonathan Swift, I have made a meagre effort to express my further thoughts on this issue in song, to be sung to the tune of "Grandma Got Run Over By a Reindeer".



Grandpa Got Run Over by a Tuk-Tuk


Grandpa got run over by a Tuk-Tuk
Walking home from whorehouse Sunday eve
You can say there’s no such thing as justice
But as for me and Bong Srey* we believe

He’d forgotten his Viagra
And he’d found a Miss Right Now
So he left to find his blue pills
To ensure Cambodian Boom Boom Pow

But Gramps had been super forgetful
In the throes of new romance
He forgot his hearing aid and glasses
So against a speeding tuk-tuk, he stood no chance.


The tuk-tuk driver hadn’t see him
Or so he claimed to the police
Who arrived to fine the white man
Who was lying dazed but aroused in the street


And now Grandpa’s back with Grandma
And he’s got a lot to ‘splain
How he wasn’t at a conference
But was seeking Asia nooky down the lane

[Chorus! All together now! ]

Grandpa got run over by a Tuk-Tuk
Walking home from whorehouse Sunday eve
You can say there’s no such thing as justice
But as for me and Bong Srey* we believe!





*Bong Srey: "Sister" in Khmer, common form of address among Cambodian women

Fear and The Business Card

Nobody likes to fail. But from my impressions, it seems Cambodians least of all, to a fault. The old adage goes “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again”. But in this country, the parallel adage would be “Of course you won’t succeed, so why bother. But if you are fool enough to try and then fail miserably, like we know you will, we will laugh at you and make many jokes at your expense.” (I paraphrase). As you can imagine, this is a powerful deterrent to risk taking around here. This attitude seems especially true in terms of improving one’s own circumstance. And since it’s tough to change without taking risks, a lot of people are going nowhere.


I saw an example of this on Friday. We the roommates went out to dinner by the riverside. Our Khmer waitress was a smiley, chatty girl, with decent English and a strong interest in practicing it on her customers. In the course of conversation, she showed us a business card an NGO customer had recently given her. A job at an NGO offers far better prospects to this young lady than working at a restaurant, especially given the likelihood in this town of waitressing morphing to hostessing and then to that Cambodian point of no return, prostitution. Anyway, our waitress was clearly proud of having been given this business card, as she should have been. It was a huge vote of confidence in her. But there was a rather big problem: She was too afraid to call. Why? We asked. First, she pointed out (in good English) that her English was not good enough to work at an NGO. We assured her that yes indeed it was. Next, she stated she was afraid she could not work at an NGO, because she had never worked at an NGO before. We shot this down too: No experience necessary, we exclaimed! Look at us, we’d never worked at NGOs before either and here we were! She gazed wistfully at the business card for some time, shifting from foot to foot, and said “But maybe...maybe I cannot do it because...” Pause for effect. “Because it might be...difficult!” Ooooohhhh. Difficult. Well, why didn’t you say so in the first place? To the western ladies volunteering at NGOs addessing horrible social problems in one of the world’s most unstable, corrupt, and upside-down countries. Difficult. Yes, well, best forget it then, nothing to be done, it won’t work out, thanks for playing. Next!


I think “Difficult” is in fact a solid argument for not doing something, but only as long as you don’t understand how difficult operates. So I tried to explain how difficult works: Yes, it would be challenging at first but only for a day, maybe a week...and then, in all likelihood, it wouldn't be so tough. Might even be easy. But success as a possibility is a hard concept to grasp while in a fear of failure mindset. Alas, I wasn’t getting through--She looked at me suspiciously and gripped the business card more tightly. It was getting late, we’d eaten and drunk everything on the table, including most of the chilli sauce on the chips because the ketchup tasted funky. It was time to go. If only we could give her a big enough push to jump bravely off the Fence of Wishing and Hoping, in one fell swoop, we could change her life and maybe even get our check. Not wanting to leave without movement on the issue, we made an agreement. We asked her to promise that the next time we saw her, she would have at least called this NGO. Smiles and nods. But what are the chances?



When I decided to come to Cambodia, I was told by previous volunteers to lower my expectations to zero in terms of any positive impact I would have. Well, that’s encouraging, I thought, thank you, can’t wait to get started! I couldn’t comprehend how that was possible. How can a person be effective in one country but ineffective in another? Ahh, the naive beauty of Western arrogance. Having arrived, I understand better why it is difficult to create real change, even in small ways. When I encounter this fear of trying and fear of failure, I sense it has deeper roots than I can grasp. And these deeper roots, history, politics, culture, are legitimately frightening (I will not write about them here). As roots do, they hold the Cambodian people firmly in place, but in a limiting rather than supportive way. Oh well, I can only work with what I've got in front of me. So I will keep chipping away at the small terrors as above, trying to understand the mentality of the moment, in the context of a country in a perpetual quiet crisis. I think this effort is worthwhile, because if and when the fear moves on, it leaves in its wake an open road, unobstructed and unimagined. And what’s so crazy is that it can start with a simple phone call.

Changes

The new people have arrived. Four new housemates, so we total seven now, all volunteering in various capacities in Cambodia. We are a lawyer, a market researcher, three physio therapists, a horse whisperer, and me. Ages range from 18-39. Six girls and one guy (a brave man to live with so many women). Our volunteer coordinator, a clever fellow who ensures we get to hospital when we fall down manholes, took us out to dinner this Saturday night. Once seated, a glass of wine in hand, I was enjoying people’s stories of why they'd chosen to come here...and waiting for the food-I was so hungry, having missed lunch. We’d ordered the house appetizers and I was impatient for snacks. But as the waiter approached with a large platter, I realized it was not the typical starter plate of potato skins, calamari, and fried cheese. Oh, lots of fried things: tarantula, snake on a stick, cockroach, frogs, a little bird, beetles, eggs, and silk worms, all nicely arranged to please the eye as well as the palate. And my new roommates dug right in. Even the vegetarian ate a beetle. I watched in horrified awe while people tried the leg of a tarantula, a bite of snake ("tastes like pork crackling"), and tossed back silk worms (“pops in your mouth”) like peanuts. When our token guy slowly and deliberately ate the entire large cockroach, I had to look away, queasy from the sight. He noted afterwards: “It took a while to chew through it.” As I say, brave man. This bloke helpfully pointed out as we left that it would have been much harder to eat all these things if they’d been alive.

Thankfully, we did finally have a “normal” dinner (Ahh, rice. Sweet plain rice). One of the many things I've learned on this trip is that I am not an adventure eater. Good to know one's limits: I'll go out on a limb, I'll climb a mountain, I'll cop a squat...but I won't eat anything ever featured on Fear Factor.

Sated and several clubs later, we went en masse to the penultimate night club in Phnom Penh, The Heart of Darkness. We the volunteers had been advised not to go to this particular place, due to past incidents of serious violence. Apparently, the combination of money, power, alcohol, arrogance, guns, and no real laws of any kind does not always yield happy results. Go figure. But tonight was violence free. Just dancing fools, full of free bugs and booze.

Street like a River

These days I moto-dop to work and tuk-tuk home. Traffic is worse here in the evenings than mornings, and a couple of nights riding home on a moto, I feared for life and/or limb, so now it's tuk-tuks all the way for evening rush hour...

And while tuk-tuks are safer than motos, they don't do as well on the rocky dirt roads that lead to my work. The first half mile of my journey home is like a carnival ride, as I am jostled around with each rut and rock the tuk-tuk passes over. No shock absorbers onboard. I’ll slip a disc one day getting so thrown about. But in the meantime, it gives the kids in the slums a good laugh to see the foreign lady hanging on to her tuk-tuk for dear life as she rides by, so maybe I'll just keep it up.

In addition to laughing at me, these local kids find other ways to amuse themselves. There is a game I see them play, which I have dubbed “Kick the Flip-Flop”. It involves (surprise) kicking a flip- flop back and forth on an approximately 5 x 7 foot playing field of available open space. Players number from 2 to 5, male, ages approximately 8-13. I’ve seen two versions of the game: One, cooperative, where the flip-flop is passed among all players; and the other, competitive, where goals are set up at either end of the playing field. The goals are made of, you guessed it, flip-flops. The game is played in bare feet. What strikes me about this game is that it reflects the tenacity of the human spirit. These kids have nothing. Nothing. I ride by their homes on my way to and from work and peer nosily into the dark little shacks that open directly onto the dirt road. There is no TV, no wii2, no Internet, no game boys or [insert latest gadget]. I think of the lengths some people go to in attempts to have fun. These kids wake up every day and make fun with whatever is at hand...or foot. Can’t make lemonade, as no lemons. But they’ve got shoes, and that’s a start.

Next week is a holiday in Cambodia, Pchum Ben, the festival of the dead, as I understand it. During this time, many Khmer people return home to the provinces to see family and to honour their ancestors, who they hope will send them luck, good health, and maybe even a little extra cash from the nether world. In Cambodia, when people describe going back to where they are from, they call it their “Homeland”. I heard this first from my tuk-tuk driver Kem, who often leaves town to go see his family. I’ll be trying to arrange a pick-up with him for later in the day and he’ll say no, explaining “Today I go to my Homeland." And then I won’t see him for several days, until I get a text from him letting me know he is back in Phnom Penh, ready to roll. While he is away, I imagine him in a faraway mystical place, The Homeland, high in the Cambodian hills, shrouded in jungle and mist. But in fact I think his homeland is a small, dusty, mosquito-ridden village a couple hours down the road towards Saigon.

With all these thoughts of homeland and ancestors, I am homesick this week. For the first time since I left. This started in Hong Kong, I think triggered by an unplanned (and pointless) visit to Marks and Spencers--Thought I was back in London for a crazy minute. Yikes. Then once home in Phnom Penh, I had a few days of “What am I doing here”, which I’d not experienced before. Everything felt foreign, so completely had I disconnected while away. I’m over it, happily back in my routine. A seasoned Phnom Penh veteran said this happened to him once as well, so I am not alone. However, I am left with a vague but persistent ache for New England, where I have not lived for many years, but which I seem to identify as the “home” in “homesickness”.

And therefore, I now firmly believe that for an adventure like this, a little geographical “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” treatment would not be a bad thing. Memory can hold a person back during lengthy trips away, if one keeps longing for the old in the face of the new. Take, for instance, the fact that I miss Western autumn. Viscerally. Pumpkin patches, apple picking, foliage, waning days. And family: I associate fall with kayaking with my dad. I am the farthest away from home, for the longest time I have ever been away, during a poignant season. Interestingly, I’ve met some Westerners in town who have lived here so long they seem immune to memory. They are made of sterner stuff than me.

I remind myself to embrace the new-the never-ending supply of wonderful and different-take whatever the hot and humid day brings-just kick the flop-flop. So it's a different kind of autumn for me, where instead of falling leaves, there's falling water: Rain and lots of it. This posting’s title is from Kem. Thursday, he arrived to pick me up shortly after the afternoon rains began. The street had flooded within minutes and to reach his tuk-tuk, I had to step into eight inches of rainwater. This took some self-counsel. As I contemplated the untreated water, I wondered what tropical disease it might have in store. But step in it I did, with my flip-flop shod feet. And as we roared down the road towards higher ground, Kem, clearly enjoying this, kept yelling “Street like a river!!!” while I rummaged in my backpack for a camera. In the photo above we are nearly out of it, as I’m slow on the draw, but you get a view. Water, water everywhere.

Reflections

This weekend, I am taking a pause from the developing country immersion experience: As I type, I am sitting poolside on the roof deck of a five star Hong Kong hotel, shamelessly mooching off a talented friend who has flown in from NYC for a job interview. This weekend has been full of fancy drinks, swanky bars, glitzy shopping and I am now in reverse culture shock, dazed by all the creature comforts. This intermission ends tomorrow and then it’s back to bottled water and 99% DEET. But in the meantime, this break from Phnom Penh is allowing me to reflect on my experience so far. I am two months in to a six month stint. How’s it going?

To help answer this, I have re-read what I've written so far. It’s worth noting that before I left London in July to begin this adventure, I had a rather high level of fear. The most accurate word is terror. The unknown is scary stuff. But I got on that plane regardless. And now, in re-reading, I notice that I sound less shell-shocked with each successive post. Aside from the occasional heat-induced spelling mistake, (and no spell checker on blogspot that I can find), I think things are going better than expected.

And a few comments about Hong Kong. First, wow, what a city!! I have never been before and while I’ve barely scratched the surface, what a stunning and fascinating place, from the water to the skyline. I will no doubt return. Second, it helps to be with someone who speaks fluent Mandarin (or Cantonese, as that is the local language): Our cab driver tried to seriously rip us off last night and was surprised to be scolded in his native tongue for taking advantage of foreigners. Third, and most importantly, I am ready to go back to Phnom Penh tomorrow. Despite enjoying the countless available amenities, I am not anywhere near wanting to return to Western-style living. This is a useful benchmark measure that is difficult to take in situ.

On this trip, I have learned that trying to move seamlessly between developed and developing regions brings unforeseen problems. To explain: We were invited last night to a party at a nice jazz club. Not surprisingly, I have a very limited selection of clothing with me in Cambodia, due to airline baggage weight restrictions and the need to bring practical things like large volumes of antibiotic ointment and Malarone. I certainly don’t have clothes for clubbing with high-flying future employers of friends. Furthermore, everything I own has been roughly hand-washed for the past two months, so I am cultivating sort of a shabby-chic look, heavy on the shabby, hold the chic.

So with only my sad NGO-appropriate clothes in my bag, I had nothing presentable to wear to this party. Off to the mall to find an outfit. Luckily, I only needed to locate a decent top, as had discovered the perfect pair of jeans earlier in the day, (a religious experience in and of itself, especially as jeans were too heavy to make the packing cut back in July, so have been jean-less for two months). Anyway, reverse culture shock was in full effect as I wandered about the massive shopping mall, numb from the industrial strength air-con, feeling overwhelmed by the endless clothing options. I had ventured into Zara and was having difficulty discerning what was cute and what was not, so accustomed had I become to my grungy attire, when I saw the models. Now, while models are not known for their expertise in securities law like my smarty-pants friend, they do know a thing or two about clothes: They are the divining rod for smart fashion choices. These preternatural creatures were flitting around Zara, alighting here and there like butterflies at different clothing racks, in search of the elusive size zero. I waited patiently, like a biologist in the field, noting what items interested them. When they finally flew away to their next photo shoot, I, in my frayed,wrinkled, fashion "don't" outfit, moved in like a jackal to the clothes rack they’d just abandoned...and found the perfect party top. Which I must say was a big hit.

And while I fear for this delicate chemise once in the hands of my Phnom Penh laundress, it won't bother me if it soon falls to bits. Because, while it may not survive the rough handling of a developing country, on reflection, I know that I will.